The Bank acquired a stake in the Watchout!AI project, which analyzes content without allowing brand advertising to appear in a negative context. The Bank acquired 8% in Brand Safety LLC, which operates this service. The entire company was valued at 125 million rubles.
According to Vitaly Sotnikov, founder of Watchout!AI, now the service is integrated with Sbermarketing solutions, including for solving problems of external clients.
The project was launched in 2019 and was included in the list of finalists of the Sberbank accelerator and 500 Startups. The service recognizes text for negativity using artificial intelligence with an accuracy of 96%.
“WatchoutAI implements technology that will allow businesses to reduce the reputational and image risks of automated display of native ads and determining the security of ad placements. The solution is based on our own developments based on computer vision technologies, which allow analyzing text, photo and video content for the security of advertising placements, - said Sergey Khodakov, Operations Director of the Skolkovo Foundation's IT Cluster. - An important advantage of the solution is a large number of semantic categories, which makes it possible to identify advertising messages with negative content. In terms of project implementation, it is worth noting the high professionalism of the team and the high relevance of the created solution. Attracting investments is an important stage in the further development of the product, and having a technology leader among its shareholders will allow it to further accelerate business scaling. ”
This is not the first time that Sberbank has invested in Skolkovo companies. So, in 2017, the bank acquired 25% of VisionLabs, which is one of the world leaders in computer systems for face recognition. Two years later, Sberbank bought a 51% stake in the Speech Technology Center group, a developer of a speech recognition system.